I just noticed this after installing Win7.

My 5850 is connected to my monitor via an HDMI cable.

I was quite surprised to find sound coming out of my monitor's speakers even though I have no connection between the monitor and my Sound Blaster card!

Could the graphics card possibly be sending the sound blaster sound to my monitor or is the Radeon card a sound card now too?

I always assumed the only way to get sound from a card was to connect speakers to the back panel port but, now that i think about it, I guess the card can also send its output out through the PCI interface as well. I never use USB headsets but, I guess that is how they get the output from the sound. The OS receives the signal from the pci interface and redirects it to the USB port. I guess the same thing is happening here if the Radeon is not a sound card as well?

Too funny... I have not be unsure about a PC issue like this since DOS days

HDMI is a display + audio cable standard. Some GPUs with HDMI outputs need to have an audio input connected to the card inside your case. Others (apparently such as yours) get the audio information from the PCI connection and send it to your monitor over the HDMI cable.

Cool. Thanks Joe!

The new HDMI 1.4 standard will offer enhanced data rates and the ability to carry a network signal over the cable at speeds of up to 100Mbps.

This means you will soon be able to network devices like your big screen TV/monitor, XBOX 360, etc, all over HDMI. No more drilling holes in your home to run network cables. Yay!

-Skater

GRRRRR....

Last night my kid was watching me play Fallout and asked to hear what was going on... no problem, right? I just unplug my headset and plug my sound card into my monitor, right?

Wrong.

Evidently an active HDMI connection kills the old school sound card port? I end that sentence with a question mark because when I called Samsung support about my monitor speakers, they did not even try to troubleshoot it, they just wanted me to ship my monitor in.... ?!?!?!?!

What is going on lately with electronics? Everything I buy is broken...

New Cougar
New Dell PC
New Asus Vid Card

I have better luck with used crap on ebay then I do retail shopping lately.

If you use a standard DVI cable, you won't have that headache. Certainly shipping the monitor in is not necessary right now.

The idea behind HDMI being Audio and Video is generally sound, but I don't like how HDMI seems to "hug" the Audio signal unwilling to ever release it. I'm sure there's software configuration to solve this, but I can't be bothered with such stuff when simple sticking with the normal cables will do it.

Yeah, I did some research to ensure I would not lose image quality going back to DVI and went ahead and switched.

Thanks!

DVI is really a damn fine interface for the next years and up to 2560x resolutions. I looked into HDMI and DisplayPort to see if I could smaller cables (for extensions) but that didn't seem any better, so DVI for now.

It's the same problem I would have had (never came trough with the project) of linking an XBOX360 to my Dell by HDMI. It requires extra cabling and adapters just to get the sound off the HDMI into other speakers (my monitor has none).

Can't see the point for video beamers either - their speakers (if any are present) are usually quite crap.

What we have here IMHO is simple a Living Room / TV-Set Interface abused for computer purposes, and I find it a bit of a shame that new tech leads to such predictable problems.